1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Printer devices that perform printing page by page have so far been known. Such printer devices are sometimes called “page printers”. For example, a color printer as one of such page printers analyzes a page description language (PDL), draws a multi-valued band image, performs processes of color conversion, gradation, and encoding, decodes the codes after being accumulated for one page, and prints the processed image. Although such page printers are required, for example, to have a high resolution in printing and a high print speed, the performance of a central processing unit (CPU) has become difficult to fulfill these requirements.
Hence, technologies are nowadays available that implement some of processes performed by the CPU with hardware. For example, image processing, such as translucency processing including translucent drawing, can be implemented with hardware. In the translucency processing, correct colors of a background that is a gradation-processed image are difficult to be identified, so that the translucency processing is difficult to be applied to the image drawn by less-than-multi-valued drawing. Consequently, if translucent drawing is included, hardware for multi-valued drawing is used, and if translucent drawing is not included, hardware for less-than-multi-valued drawing is used.
Conventional technologies are described, for example, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2011-25539, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-269341, and Japanese Patent No. 4490783.
The conventional technology described above, however, has a problem of increasing the scale of the configuration of the hardware used for the image processing. Specifically, the conventional technology increases the scale of the configuration of the hardware used for the image processing because of using the hardware for multi-valued drawing and the hardware for less-than-multi-valued drawing.
Therefore, there is a need for an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and an image forming apparatus that can simplify the configuration of the hardware used for the image processing.